Click-ish

Social networking on the innnernetz now reminds me of "social networking" in middle school. Maybe life reminds me of "social networking in middle school."

An on-line mathematician writes, "When I went to high school, everybody complained about the ``clique'', a group of friends who all hung around together and seemed to dominate everything social. Consider a graph whose vertices represent a set of people, with edges between any pair of people who are friends. Thus the clique in high school was in fact a clique in this friendship graph."


And there's that book -- All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?!...Fulghum, a retired Unitarian minister, does not express uncommon thoughts here: his thoughts are those we all wish were true. The book's tone is set by the title piece, in which the author sets out his credo, ranging from "share everything" to "hold hands and stick together." (quoted from Amazon). Frankly, I think that what many people "learn in kindergarten," so to speak, is to be mean and click-ish

Thing is, a lot of what I learnt in kindergarten is that kids are mean. myspaze is a playground and, I have found, can be full of kiddiness (akin to truthiness). The other day, I got dumped.



I never should have opened a myspace account. I mean, OMG, I got dumped. I myspazed some guy from a around the block then put on just too much comment material when all he really wanted to do was connect with his girlfriend and other friends. I overcompensated in trying to make new friends. And he, rightfully, did not desire to have unwanted material from some guy he once talked with about Pavement clogging up his myspaze homepage.

So, using his myspace perogative -- he went back to "private" on me. I got dumped. I got dumped and it felt just like middle school. Alas, see you later, "Shaky Hands." See you around the neighborhood, but I won't see you in my myspaceneighborhood. I will still patronize your innernetz cafe. I will still say, "hi" around the 'hood... WHY? Because Everything that I Know I Learned from the Ballad of Billy Jack.

An on-line "Social Networking Theoritician" writes about BILLY JACK (1971) as follows - The movie "Billy Jack" has had a greater impact on who I am as a person than any movie I have ever seen. In 1971, at the age of 12 I was dealing with the divorce of my parents, the temptation of drugs and life in a violent and spiritually bankrupt home. I saw a trailer for a movie called "Billy Jack." The karate fight appealed to my budding sense of machismo, so I drug my little stepbrother to a matinee. Seeds of a deeper devotion to my Native-American ancestry (1/8 Cherokee), political activism, racial equality and a desire to take up karate (I never did) were planted as Tom Laughlin's independent blockbuster flashed across the screen.

SING WITH ME NOW:

Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago,
'Bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley-folk below.

On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath the stone,
And the valley-people swore
They'd have it for their very own.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.

- One Tin Soldier (The Legend of Billy Jack)
by Lambert-Potter, sung by Coven

Not yet sure what all this means. But I sure do love that movie and that song. And I think they were popular when I was in kindergarten.